Author: Peter

Q&A part 1: background and inspiration

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I had an interesting Q&A session answering a range of questions about my writing, how I got started, my routines, and inspiration and so on. What’s interesting about it is that it forces me to think about and articulate many of the things I take for granted or haven’t considered for a long time. Whether you’re a writer or not, I think it can be a rewarding and enlightening experience.

There’s quite a bit, so I’ll add the entire session over a few posts. This is the first. Feel free to ask me your own questions.

Question: Can you tell us about your journey from the corporate world to becoming a writer?

P. J. Moroney: Well, I was always a writer, I think, but it was easier making a living working in corporate, so that’s what I did. I was good at it mostly and enjoyed a lot of it. It’s an interesting question to consider as I think the split between those two options reflected different sides of my persona. And I think my writing fed off my work to a large degree.

To start with, I never considered my writing to be a viable career option, so it was easy to work a job instead. My dad was a bit of a mover and shaker and would wear a suit to work every day, so I grew up around that. I never really considered any other option but white collar.

It suited me in ways. Back when I started, it was pretty ruthless, but I took to it. I saw it as a challenge and I discovered I was more robust and competitive than I thought. I enjoyed the cut and thrust. Enjoyed the striving. I think it made me a little of who I am.

It wasn’t a bad life. We were the cliche, worked hard, played hard. I had the attitude that I didn’t want to moulder and grow old in the corner, so I put my hand up for a lot. It was more interesting that way, and it could be very rewarding. It financed a lifestyle for many years.

For a while, I styled myself as a bit of a corporate bohemian. I was deliberately out of step in ways, but much of it came naturally. I realised it was more fun doing things for the experience than the reward, though I prospered from it. I was very confident of my abilities and always reckoned I was more value giving my honest opinion than toeing the conventional line. I think I got a reputation for being blunt, though once someone said I was like a wholesome, private school type. It might sound corny, but integrity was always important to me. I was never a yes man.

Long story short, you get older, life happens, shit happens, perspectives change, and so do the times. I was pretty jaded towards the end. Stale and unhappy. Even angry. I was writing a lot more by then – I’d always written – and was beginning to think that I might make something of it. The big moment came, and I took it – a redundancy. That’s when I really started to take my writing seriously.

I’m skipping over a lot of stuff here – a few catastrophes along the way, Covid, cancer, and so on, but that’s the general drift.

I still do some corporate stuff, but freelance, minus suit and tie, working from home and only when I want to. Have to pay the rent.

Question: You said you were angry. What were you angry about?

P. J. Moroney: I’d had cancer. I felt damaged. I was damaged – didn’t have the strength or stamina of before, I was half deaf and couldn’t speak near as well. It’s hard to take. I felt diminished, and it was a long time before I could accept it. I was always too proud.

Anyway, I returned as this lesser person. I had the will for the contest but not all the tools. So it seemed – and I think, in hindsight, I thought myself more deficient than I was. In the meantime, I felt labelled, categorised, squeezed into a smaller space. There was a bit of paranoia in it, but healthy paranoia, if such a thing exists. I could have let it go, but that wasn’t my style. Here I am.

Question: That’s quite powerful. How do you use that experience in your writing?

P. J. Moroney: Time will tell.

Question: How ambitious were you in your corporate life?

P. J. Moroney: That’s an interesting one to answer. I think I was ambitious on principle, but I was never much interested in status. I took things on like they were a contest I had to win. The harder and tougher it was, the more I liked it. When I started out one of my best mates told me he didn’t want any responsibility and I couldn’t get that. I wanted responsibility. I wanted to be the man, and that was true for many years. There’s some interesting psychology in that I might write about one day. Maybe I have already.

I never wanted to be CEO or anything like that, though. It was too reductive to me. What I craved was the challenge, which is why I moved from contract to contract and took on projects, I think. I liked jobs I could score.

I was ambitious from the point of view of the challenge and the rewards, but it was all about life experience. I wanted to live fully, which is why I moved between jobs and why I travelled. I had my own business for a bit, and I’m glad I did – that was a dare I couldn’t refuse. It was lucrative while it lasted, but life moves on.

Question: What inspired you to write your first novel?

P. J. Moroney: Was it inspiration? There was no light bulb moment. I was always writing. Scraps mainly. Short stories. I figured I wanted to write a novel one day, but…

This was about 20-odd years ago. One day, I had the idea for the novel. I don’t know where it came from. Elsewhere, I’ve said Heart of Darkness influenced me. I loved that book. The theme of journeying into darkness is a killer. Very me, as it turns out. Plus, the voice of Marlowe – I wanted first-person omniscient for my novel. But is there a direct connection? I doubt it. I think that probably came later.

I loved the old film noir movies, too. They probably had an indirect influence. But where did the idea come from? Magic. Thin air. One day, it wasn’t; the next day it was. That’s the beauty of creativity – it has depths you can never understand.

Mind you, though the idea came way back, it took many years before I started to write it. I’m glad it happened. For a long time, I thought it never would.

After the shitshow

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Return to work

Look, it’s been a while since I posted here regularly, mostly for pretty obvious reasons.

Life, as they call it, got in the way, particularly cancer, which is a bit of a shitshow that takes a lot out of your daily schedule – among other things. That’s as good an excuse as any, but probably more relevant is that I lost some motivation to update this regularly. I was busy with things, true enough, and nothing happened that was worth recording.

I’d written a book but couldn’t resolve to publish it. In the meantime, I did fuck all writing when I had cancer full-on. I didn’t have the energy for it; without it, it’s hard to be creative. Then, that passed, and I began writing again, but it felt very personal. I had no notion of putting myself out there. I didn’t think much beyond the page.

What’s changed is that I thought fuck it, and went out and published my novel, almost on the spur of the moment. What’s the point of it gathering dust in my bottom drawer? I’d always figured I wanted to do more with it, improve it here and there, but I realised that becomes a vanishing point you never reach. Just do it, and so I did.

Odd how I feel having done it. There are people out there reading it at this very moment (I hope!) and most likely judging it. It can be a spooky thought, and that’s how I felt initially. But then it fades. I’ve done it; it’s out of my hands. Make of it what you will. It’s almost as if I’ve put it behind me now.

The one abiding sentiment is that I always said I’d publish a novel one day, and now I have. I don’t feel the pride you might expect, but there is a sense of quiet satisfaction.

More importantly, I have another novel to work on and then another after that. I have plenty of ideas. Hopefully, I’ll get the next one – quite different – released next year.

The good news

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I’m sorry it’s been so long between posts; I’ve had cancer. I’ve endured the usual treatment for it, surgery, followed by radiotherapy and chemo, and while it ain’t much fun, I’m now cancer-free.

For the moment, I’m on the long road to recovery and haven’t written a creative word for about a year. I expect to return to some sort of normal in the next six months. I hope to be back writing before then, and I’m curious to see how my recent experiences influence my writing.

All good.

No rest for the wicked

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A couple of weeks ago, I finished writing my second novel. I thought I might finish it sooner, but the closer I got to it, the further it seemed to get away from me.

I don’t know how it is for others, but I feel incomplete until I’ve put that final word on (virtual) paper. It’s a funny thing to explain, but until then, you’ve got all these words in you and a vision of something, and you feel as if you’re racing against time to get it out there, lest you get hit by a truck – or, more scarily, the inspiration, the vision, disappears. It feels like a kind of magic, and that’s great, but it’s scary, too, and until you get it all in the bottle, there’s no rest.

The sense of relief – and release – once you’ve got it on the page is immense. You type the final full stop, sit back in your chair, and think, “Phew, I did it.”

It’s a fleeting emotion because, almost immediately, you’re aware of all the flaws in the manuscript. By the time you’ve got to the end of writing a book, you generally know the things you should have done differently and need to change, on top of which you have a sneaking suspicion that it might all be crap anyway. You think you’ve finished, but you know there’s a lot more work to do – but at least now there’s a version outside your head.

Finishing a book is tough. I’ve only written the two, so I’m not sure I can apply the term ‘generally’ yet – but, so far, I know the ending well before I get to it. I may even know how to approach it, what the tone should be, and so on – I did in the first, not in the second.

With this book just finished, I fluffed around, uncertain how to get from where I was to where I needed to get. There are many different ways to write the same scenes, and when you consider the scenes are apt to variation, there’s a lot to figure out. That’s why it took me longer than I hoped to get it finished. I couldn’t get it right and spent a lot of time staring off into the middle distance. I’d ask myself: what does it mean? What am I trying to say? What is he thinking? She? How would they react?

All of that is accentuated by the fact that nothing comes after this. There’s a full stop at the end of this, which means it has to make complete sense in itself and that all the myriad loose ends need to be addressed – if not tied up – in the few pages remaining to you.

But anyway – I did it. And it’ll do until I come to the second draft.

For now, it goes in the bottom drawer. I’ll clear my head of it, and when I get around to it again, I’ll approach it with fresh eyes. More of that later.

Sacrificing the ego

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It’s my experience of life that ego is the enemy of much that otherwise might be good, but rarely does knowing it make a difference.

It’s one of the things I write about, though surreptitiously, as are all the things I write about. (To digress for a moment, I don’t set out to write moral fables or with such a clearly defined themes. I write stories that are true in themselves and which – as it happens in life – touch upon these elements and illuminate them).

Ego can also lead you astray in your writing, though I’ll speak only for myself.

I’m thinking about it now as I’m writing this, asking myself, what is good writing? There are probably many different answers to that, but at this moment, I think it’s connecting honestly with a deeper truth and putting it on the page without shame.

To become a writer of this ilk in the first place suggests sensitivity and quite possibly some introversion. Certainly, it suggests curiosity and thoughtfulness, and perhaps even some humility. And, to be good, honesty as well.

Writing is a solitary, anti-social business, and together with that set of attributes, there’s nothing to suggest the writer has any greater ego than most, and very likely less – and in my reading, it seems that there are many who have so subverted themselves in service of their work that ego doesn’t exist.

But, of course, writers are people too. They – we? – come in all types, all shapes, all politics, all beliefs and attitudes, all personalities. Sometimes, we’ll see that in the writing; sometimes, we laud the writer for their unique vision and individuality. This is what we’ve come to see.

Ego in writing is a balancing act. If it’s ego that leads the writer to boldly walk the plank where no one else dares go, then let’s go there. But equally, the writer who removes the ego from their work creates something that draws us in because it’s on a scale we can identify with – and so becomes our story as well as theirs.

In my case, I don’t have much choice in the matter. I have an abundant ego and a healthy dose of narcissism as well. The combination has favoured me often, made me bold when I needed to be and strong when I had to hold the line. It’s also made me stupid sometimes and led me to crash and burn more than I can say – but at least it has provided excellent fuel for the creative fire.

The voice you hear now is the voice of the ego. It’s the projection of me in my writer’s get-up. I won’t tell you any more than I want you to know and in a voice calculated to charm and intrigue. It’s not false or insincere; it comes unadulterated from my mind (you get the first draft), but the tone is curated to create an image of me as an individual. Never mind the other shit I keep secret from you.

But later, when I sit down to do my actual writing, I’ll look to set that ego aside. That’s a work in progress, but then I’m doing this for a reason. Fiction writing isn’t a vanity project. I set out writing all those years ago for a range of reasons. Ego was one of them – I wanted to leave a record, a mark, of my existence. But what drove it forward was curiosity, wonder, and a search for a kind of truth that made sense to me, and ego had no part in that – just the opposite.

This is not to say that ego is absent from my fiction writing. It informs how the stories come together, and it’s there in a voice I want to be heard. I’m not so humble that I want to take myself out of the story altogether, but the trick is to manage it, which means being ruthless sometimes, like Faulkner said, killing your darlings when they need to be killed.

In this way, at least, I am without ego – as I’m not in life, I seek to prostrate myself on the page. There’s a kind of glory in such humility, even if at one remove. Everything is subject to the raw truth. I’m searching for it for myself, and you readers get the chance to come along for the journey.

Be yourself

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I was doing some housework the other day while listening to a Spotify playlist, which is pretty well the only way I can do household chores. I’m in a numb groove, the music plays and I sing along when it takes me, skipping songs every now or then, or pumping up the volume for the good ones, while like an automaton I clean and polish.

An Audioslave song comes on. It’s the late and great Chris Cornell with his smoky, resonant voice urging us to Be Yourself and I pause for a moment to increase the volume. Then back to work, I am, moving to the music, belting it out as I’m wiping down the kitchen bench, and it triggers something me, bang, like that.

I’d been struggling with my writing. I felt uninspired and everything I wrote seemed dull and lifeless. Words on a page. There are musical equivalents to that, but this song wasn’t one of them. It’s vibrant and Cornell’s voice gives it a sinuous grace, even as the bassline drives it along. It’s not the greatest song ever, but it’s vibrant and real – and that’s what you want in your writing, something vibrant and real. And I’m feeling it when the sentiment hits me: be yourself.

God knows that’s something I’ve tried to live by in my life and mostly succeeded, though not always to best effect. In theory, it’s what you want in your writing too – it’s your unique voice and perspective that’s going to sell it. But then writing is a more conscious business. To be yourself truly when you write is to go out on a limb, fearful that it may snap behind you. It’s much safer, much easier, to retreat into writerly habits.

On your bookshelves are your idols, great writers with a diverse range of voices and perspectives, every one of them different, but when pressed you go back to them. How would so-and-so write this, or what’s his name? It becomes an exercise in consciously grinding the prose out, bereft of inspiration. You write how you think you should write, rather write how it feels natural.

And that’s what I realised suddenly as I was wiping down the kitchen bench. I had become a technician churning out words that almost by definition must be dull and lifeless. I may as well have been writing a textbook. I wasn’t writing from what I felt. I was sitting there disengaged from the urge that had led me to write in the first place. The creativity that animated me had been submerged by a conscious mind too busy thinking. My instinct, my voice, had deserted me.

I went back to my work and just about dumped the last weeks’ worth of writing. I returned to the well, letting myself feel the story again and not simply think it. Why was this story important? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Where was I in it? I let it return to me slowly, let it fill me again until I knew it again like fate yet to be written.

There’s a spirit of irreverence in this. This is your story, why concern yourself with the rules imposed by others? Let it go. Let it be. Let it flow through you, let the words come, fresh and with a zip. Tidy it later if you need to (and you certainly will), but give it life by letting it go.

So, I got back inside of the story and let it drive me forward and all I did was use the words given me.

I think it’s very easy to lose your way when writing, particularly when something comes of it. I think that’s one reason some authors struggle so badly writing their second novel. They have become self-conscious with what they have achieved. They try to emulate it. They force it. With a bit of success, they feel as if they have now to measure up to a higher standard, but it was the standard they achieved without a conscious thought that matters.

Everyone has a different opinion and there’s probably no right way or wrong way, except what is right or wrong for you. My two cents worth is that stories come from inside, and it’s from inside you must write. You can’t search for stories outside you and hope for them to be real. You have to own them, have to live them in a way – as real as your own life – just in a different dimension.

I’ll have to remind myself of this, again and again, I’m sure: be yourself. That’s the good stuff.

Finding it

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What happens mostly when I’m working on something is that my mind goes ahead of me. While I’m working in the present, there’s a part of me looking towards what comes next. As I go about my daily business, riding the train, lying in a bath or preparing the night’s meal, that part is sorting through options and assessing the best way forward. It’s hardly conscious, though occasionally something will bob up in the middle of all this. And, generally, by the time I sit down again to work, whatever it is my mind has come up with will be there for me to draw upon.

It’s a comforting process. The blank page is never completely blank when there’s something ripe in your mind. It seems more valid than sitting down and telling myself to ‘be creative’. I think when you force it upon yourself, it comes out feeling forced on the page. I have faith in this subterranean process because – though I don’t understand it completely – it feels organic to what I’m doing. It is born, if that’s the word, from where I’m at, what’s come before, and where I want to get to. It knows better than I do.

There are times it doesn’t work like that. I had that situation yesterday. I’ve had a busy week and a lot to think about outside my writing. That part of my mind that might otherwise have been quietly working away at the story was occupied with more mundane demands. And so when I sat down to work, there was nothing to work with. I knew which way I wanted the story to go, but I didn’t have the words or the hooks to take me there.

I wrote something nonetheless. I knew the inspiration was missing, so I concentrated on pure narrative. A lot of writing is the things in between, so it wasn’t a wasted effort, and I knew it would come to me. And, always, it is better to write something than nothing.

I left it, and this time, part of my mind was on the job. I watched an interesting movie. I read from a book full of vivid prose and another that conjectured a clever storyline. I drank coffee, did housework, and walked the dog and throughout, I’m half aware that something is going on in the background, but I don’t push it. Let it bubble and seethe.

I came to the job today, and there it was. I didn’t have all the words, but I had the tenor of them. And there were fragments, images and snippets of prose that had come to the forefront. They meant little by themselves and little even in themselves – just small things, seemingly – but as I wrote, these were the fragments the story formed around. Somehow, they represented meaning. I knew them even if I couldn’t explain them.

I’m writing this now after having laid down about a thousand words this morning. I feel on a roll and will probably go with it again later this afternoon while it’s still full in me.

This, of course, is a very satisfying feeling, and I wanted to share it. This is what it feels like sometimes. Sometimes, it feels like a terrible chore. Sometimes, you doubt everything. But sometimes, it is like this, and all is forgiven.

And what were the fragments? I’ll share with you, though they’ll likely make no more sense to you than they will to me on any other day.

There was a phrase about the day remade.

And an image of the protagonist carefully laying his suit jacket on the back seat of his car.

And a snippet of dialogue that set me off on this pathway: “The colours were different, then.”

Stories from the night

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I wrote a story yesterday. It wasn’t something I’d planned to do. The story wasn’t even in my mind until the hours before. And even when it was in my mind, I thought I would jot down no more than a few notes for it. Once I started, though, I couldn’t stop.

This story is an interesting case study in the creative process. As I said, I had no conception of the story until the early hours. In fact, I woke with this in my head in the middle of the night. I lay in bed in the dark, turning it over in my head. I let it lead me on, my conscious mind fleshing out the bones the subconscious had provided me with. It was a fair story, I thought, but how often have I thought that and reconsidered it come daylight? Even more so, how many stories have been lost because, from sleep to wakefulness, they have been forgotten?

I woke, and I remembered this. As I prepared for work, it was rolling around in my mind. It seemed a fair story still. And so, when I found a moment, I began to write it down.

What I’ve written is far from the finished product, but it’s complete. I dashed it out, not thinking too much over it, not spending the time I might typically giving it a veneer of polish. It was all story, and every bit of it heartfelt.

It’s fascinating in this case as this story has an apparent reference to my own story. It’s entirely fictional but draws on my experiences and feelings. Most of those experiences I have pushed to one side. The emotions I rarely dwell on. That’s the crux of it, though – I think. My conscious self has moved on, but these things remain real and relevant in some deep part of myself.

I don’t know if this could be called a dream, but it has much in common with dreams as I understand them. I’m one of those people who believes that dreams can reveal hidden truths. There’s an honesty to our subconscious because it is not subject to the whims and ego of the conscious mind. It does away with the nonsense that dictates we must be this person or must do that. Dreams may exaggerate and transfigure, but often, they present an underlying reality we are unwilling or unable to face in our conscious self.

I know that sounds like amateur pop psychology. You can take or leave it, but it’s true to my experience and observation. Most dreams have obscure meanings, if they have any meaning at all, even when remembered. Others, like last night, present truth in the form of a parable. Isn’t that what writing is about? It is for me.

I have a history that I won’t go into here. The story that came out of the night directly touches upon that. I’ve written it out now, but as I did, I wondered what it meant for me. It felt like a candid message from my soul. You may deny it, Peter, but these are the things that are important to you – these are the things you crave.

Not all stories come like that. If you gave me ten minutes to come up with a brand new story, I could probably pluck something from the air. That’s the exception, though. I don’t sit down and search for stories – they come to me. It’s rare they arrive as last night’s story did, but it’s indicative of the process nonetheless. The story yesterday was seemingly conceived and written within a 24-hour block, but I can guarantee the essential truth of it has been in me much longer than that, evolving and shaping itself into a tale that finally came out yesterday.

The next story is in me now, bubbling in the background, though as I type this, I’m oblivious to it. When it’s ripe, it will come out. It’s what’s in the pot that’s important.

Magical writing

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There are many things in writing that appear pretty random but almost certainly aren’t. I’ve taken a stab at trying to figure out where stories come from, but I don’t really know. One day, they’re just there, though you can bet they’ve probably been a long time coming.

That’s how it was with the story I’m working on now. One day, I woke up, and it was in my head. It came pretty complete. I didn’t have all the details, but the frame was all there.

I remember I wandered into work pretty much like any other day. I got my coffee and mentioned it to my offsider. He looked at me, his head tilted, figuring out the story in his head as I told him of it. Then he nodded his head. “That’s a good story,” he said.

I was still working on my first book then, so I shoved the idea into the stories to write part of my brain.

Generally, when I have a novel like this in my head, I’ll have the beginning and the end and bits and pieces in between. I’ll know what the story is about and what I want to say, but there will be a lot of gaps in the storyline. It’s like planning a trip from Melbourne to Sydney and knowing you’ve got to go via Upper Kumbucta West or somesuch, but otherwise, you don’t know what route you’ll be taking until you’re in the car driving; what stops you’ll be making, and what’ll happen along the way.

I started writing this one about seven months ago. The first few chapters were clear, and I was happy to let them guide me the rest of the way. There’ve been times occasionally when I’ve felt uninspired and struggling. On one occasion, I had to return to a previous fork in the road and try the other way. Once or twice, I’ve felt so outside the story I felt like shoving it in the bottom drawer as well, come a better day. Naturally, there’ve been moments I’ve doubted the whole enterprise, including my skill as a writer. Who’re you kidding, Peter? You’re just a plodder, mate, get over it…

The thing is, with the sort of writing I do, while it’s important to have a good plot, it’s really about the ideas. I’m not motivated by seeing my name in lights or my book in every store. I’d love to make a fortune, but, yeah, nah, it’s the ideas I really want to explore. The story is the vehicle for that.

So it was with this story. I started with ideas – themes if you like – but they’re pretty general initially. While the plot was clear to me, many deeper, underlying themes only became evident as I began to write.

That’s the difference between being inside the story and outside it. Outside, you see the outline of what you figure is a cool idea, but once you get inside the story, it begins to take on its own life. You advance carefully, feeling your way. Many times, you retreat, knowing it’s not quite right. That’s when you sit in front of your screen looking blank while your mind goes a million miles an hour. You feel it, then. It’s heavy and complex, just like people are. While you search your mind – there’s a lot of sheer figuring things out – you can feel it in your gut, too, and your gut doesn’t lie.

You’re searching for truth, but the truth comes from the story, the text, and not anything you impose upon it. By now, the story has its own life. It’s your job to understand and to chart it. I know that sounds a bit of a toss, but that’s how it is. Quite often, I start off writing, thinking it’s about one thing before discovering there’s more to it than that, and my job is to listen well and get it right. There’s a different, more intimate truth you’re after – and there are multitudes in it.

Halfway through writing this, I had a small epiphany. In my spare time, I was reading of Homer, and specifically, of Achilles, the mighty Greek warrior. As I read, I began to discern reflections of my character’s journey in Achilles. It was a surprise, but it excited me too.

In the Iliad, Achilles is nearly invincible. By myth, he was held by the heel as an infant and dipped in a magical pool that made him immune to injury. As an adult, he becomes a proud, somewhat arrogant character, though capable of great complexity. Ultimately – beyond the pages of the Iliad, he will perish victim of his only flaw – an arrow to the heel left unprotected.

But what Achilles doesn’t perish? What if he lives on well after the sacking of Troy and the death of so many mighty? What if he passes into middle age, a warrior of legend but creaking and aching and grey now? His days of might have passed. He has defeated thousands in battle, but in middle age, he has settled into an existence where he wonders what it all means. Looking back, he knows it was real, but it feels distant now as if then he was a different man. It is this he must reconcile.

That’s what my story is, in a way, though inadvertent. It’s modernised, and instead of being a warrior, the protagonist is a once great sportsman.

I’m not far off finishing this novel, though there will likely be a couple of rewrites before I’m happy. The point is I started with an idea, which still holds true, but as I’ve gone along, I’ve found unexpected complexity in it. It’s like the act of writing reveals truths that were always there but hidden from the eye.

In itself, that’s not surprising. Like I say, to write is to go on a journey. What surprises me every time is that I learn from my own words. I sit back and read what I have written and wonder where it came from. There’s depth and knowledge and even a kind of wisdom, or so it appears – and I wonder if I am that man. It feels almost like a form of automatic writing, but I know the effort that has gone into producing it – there’s nothing automatic about it. But it is magical.

I don’t know what it’s like for other writers – I can only ever speak for myself. I know the satisfaction of having written something pretty good and look forward to the day when it is more generally acclaimed. That’s pretty conventional, I think. No one would be surprised at that. But there’s a deeply personal aspect that is just as satisfying, if not more so.

Writing is a form of self-discovery. You go into the depths of yourself and, from the darkness inside, drag up nuggets of truth you didn’t know existed. And while it looks good on the page, you can’t help but reflect on what it says about you. The meaning of us, I suspect, is more profound and complex than we understand. We get few opportunities to see more deeply within, but in writing, I catch a glimpse of that self inside me, both mysterious and somehow holy.

That’s as good as any reason to write that I can think of.